Movie retrospective: celebrating our 25th year with digital visual effects and scenes from animated features: Part 7.

Although Looker (1981) was the first film with shaded 3D computer graphics, Tron (1982) was the first with 15 minutes of computer animation and lots of shaded graphics. Some believe Tron's box office failure slowed the adoption of digital effects, but now most films include computer graphics. Indeed, last year, of the top 10 box office films, eight had hundreds of digital effects shots or were created entirely with 3D computer graphics. During the past two decades, CG inventors have been inspired by filmmaking to create exciting new tools. In so doing, they have inspired filmmakers to expand the art of filmmaking--as you can see on the following pages. What's next? CG ...